Ex-Prosecutor Says Trial Could Have Been Avoided

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner could have convicted key “Twilight Zone” defendants of felonies nearly two years ago without a costly, 10-month trial by accepting their offers to plead guilty to a conspiracy to violate child labor laws. That is the account of the former prosecutor on the case, who said he strongly recommended that Reiner accept the offers, and of the defense attorney who said he made them.

However, Reiner and his top aide, Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert I. Garcetti, disputed some of those assertions Friday, saying they had received only a tentative feeler, rather than a formal offer from the defense. They said they rejected it because the defendants were discussing pleading guilty to a charge that was irrelevant to the central issue in the case--culpability in the deaths of two children and actor Vic Morrow killed in a helicopter crash on the film set.

Reiner said that to have accepted such a plea bargain to either a misdemeanor or felony violation of child labor laws for employing children without a permit would have trivialized the involuntary manslaughter case.

Asked if he regarded taking the case to trial as a mistake in light of Friday’s not guilty verdicts, Reiner responded: “Of course not.”

Ex-Prosecutor’s Recollection

The original “Twilight Zone” prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Gary P. Kesselman, said in an interview last month that attorneys for director John Landis, associate producer George Folsey Jr. and production manager Dan Allingham approached him in 1985 and offered to plead guilty to a felony conspiracy if the district attorney’s office would drop the more serious involuntary manslaughter charges.

The offer was contingent upon the district attorney’s office agreeing that the defendants would face only the possibility of a year or less in County Jail, rather than any time in state prison, Kesselman said.

“My feeling,” Kesselman recalled, “was that there would be no judge (who) would be likely to send these defendants to state prison,” even if they were convicted of involuntary manslaughter. “I mean, these are not the normal criminal defendants. . . . They certainly never set out to hurt anyone.

“We were being offered the (guilty pleas to) felony conspiracy. They could receive up to a year in County Jail. . . . I told Reiner that to me, the preliminary hearing with a full and complete defense (had been like a) trial, that no one had ever stood up to Hollywood before . . . and in essence we had won.

“And I couldn’t see any reason to go through the trial . . . with the attendant costs and the risk to obtain probably no better than we were obtaining by way of disposition.

“I pointed out a lot of the inherent weaknesses of the case . . . and I was obviously not making very much progress in terms of Ira Reiner, who was sitting there and telling me that we have a helicopter, we have explosions and the helicopter crashed and, in essence, what more do you need?”

Reiner rejected a settlement, and Kesselman was shortly thereafter replaced as prosecutor on the case by Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea Purwin D’Agostino, who tried it and lost it.

Reiner praised her Friday, saying, “She worked very hard, she worked night and day and she did a solid job.”

Cost Put at $800,000

The trial cost the county about $6,500 a day, according to John Walker, director of criminal court services for the Los Angeles County Superior Court. That figures out to about $800,000 over its course.

Kesselman, who is now assigned to the district attorney’s central complaints section, has said he asked to be taken off the “Twilight Zone” case for personal reasons. Garcetti has said Kesselman was removed from the case against his will.

Kesselman made his statements last month on the condition that they not be reported until the “Twilight Zone” case was in the hands of the jury.

Reiner, when told of Kesselman’s account, said: “It didn’t happen. . . . There was a discussion of a plea to a misdemeanor, which was working the children in the evening (without a permit), which was not an appropriate disposition for a case like this, where you have three deaths.

“Besides, it is a legal distinction without a difference. . . . Whether it’s a conspiracy to (work the children without a permit--a felony) or just (working the children without a permit--a misdemeanor) is pretty meaningless.”

Reiner said he would have rejected the plea offer even if it had been to a felony because to have accepted it in a case of three deaths would have been “plea-bargaining at its absolute worst.”

“It’s an exaggeration to say there was any real discussion of this,” he said.

His chief assistant, Garcetti, said that his recollection initially matched Reiner’s, but that he checked with a colleague who told him it is “possible they did come in and say they’ll plead to the felony, but that there would be a misdemeanor sentence. . . .”

“Really what they wanted was a misdemeanor with no time in jail,” Garcetti said.

‘That Was Laughable’

“That was unacceptable. That was laughable. . . . We always treated it as a misdemeanor plea. By the time it was presented to Ira (Reiner), it was presented as a misdemeanor plea.”

Garcetti and Reiner said that Kesselman presented the defense offer in a neutral manner rather than strongly arguing for it.

Garcetti said he agreed with Kesselman’s assessment that a judge would be unlikely to send the defendants to state prison even if they were convicted of involuntary manslaughter at trial.

“We knew they wouldn’t go to prison,” Garcetti said. “But we thought they might be sent to County Jail for a period of time. It might be 30 days. But we didn’t want that option taken away from us.

“We read their offer (as being) that they wanted to make sure no defendant would spend even one day in County Jail. And that we weren’t willing to give.”

The attorney who made the offer, Harland Braun, said: “They’re wrong. They’re trying to say that now. We were trying to plead to the conspiracy” because it would not have involved admissions of culpability in the children’s deaths that could have compromised the defendants in wrongful-death civil suits filed against them by the children’s parents.

“We always figured that was what we were guilty of (child labor law violations) . . .,” Braun said.

Braun said Aurelio Munoz, supervising judge of the criminal section of Superior Court, had “indicated that if we could get together (with the district attorney’s office) on no state prison and a count (to plead guilty to), then he would see if he could close the gap. That’s the way it’s done all the time.”

Braun said that if Munoz had indicated that he would have sentenced the defendants to time in County Jail, they would have considered going forward with their guilty pleas.

But Garcetti said that “in this case,” the district attorney’s office never would have permitted a judge to decide the issue of jail time while negotiations over a guilty plea were still going on.